Zoo studies

I’d like to preface by saying that this work is not about animals. Even though you will see a lot of animals.

The Amsterdam Zoo (ARTIS) becomes a site of intervention in this work where visuality is reframed in an emancipatory way through the potency of images. It engages drawing, printmaking and cinema as forms to think with as well as experiments around image construction. The quest(ion) of modernity is dissected by looking at the tension that comes with the need for progress and the consequences of this acceleration.

Over the course of 2024, I spent time at the Amsterdam Zoo making drawings of the animals and architecture there. My framing of the zoo as a colonial structure is similar to what Berger proposed; that looking at animals in this environment becomes a way of gathering evidence not for a biological or behavioural study but as a form of critique. Therefore, these are not drawings of animals but of animals being looked at.

The animal and natural world has long been used as a symbol of progress in many works of art in Europe. For example, the imaginative rhinoceros print by Albrecht Dürer, photographic studies of motion by Eadweard Muybridge, Rembrandt’s elephant drawings, Goya’s studies of animals as a form of societal critique and studies of insects by Maria Sibylla Merian. The animal provides an entry point to the idea of transformation through imagination, motion and metamorphosis.

Further notes on this are featured in Matter Mattering Matters: A Scienticity Reader as part of my long form essay Units of Measurement under the sub-title Taxonomy & naming: on looking, erasure and illegibility.

Realism insists on order and symmetry and so in order to undo this symmetry, I developed new images constructed from the ‘real’ animals I had been drawing at the zoo using the exquisite corpse technique. The chimeras produced through this surrealist method give form to the tension that comes with the need for progress and the consequences of this acceleration. So these dissections become not animals, but the figment of my own imagination.

During the Rijksakademie Open Studios 2025 (May 22-25) I gave a talk and presented some drawings in book form as well as aquatint etchings, lithography prints and transfers on limestone. This was in conversation with numerous drawings and prints, as well as still-life and anatomy studies produced by former students of the academy, pulled from the state owned collection housed inside the Rijksakademie. The collection reflects on three centuries of educational practice at the Rijksakademie and the development of art and artistry in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and beyond; covering work from the 18th century to the present day.

‘Drawing studies’. A presentation of drawings and prints at the Rijksakademie collections room during the Open studios 2025. Photo by Sander van Wettum